British Airways cancelled 42 more flights on Friday (May 26) at Heathrow Airport in London, causing more discomfort to travellers. The airline said that the problem on Friday was a ‘knock on effect’ of the technical issue that disrupted the airline on Thursday. BBC reported that the issue affected some 16000 passengers this time.

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Most of the flights that were cancelled were domestic or going to destinations in Europe. But other services were also reportedly affected and some passengers could not check-in online.

British Airways said sorry for the disruption on Thursday and said that most of the flights were operating. The carrier also said that they contacted the affected customers and offered them refund or rebooking options to another flight with British Airways or another carrier.

On Friday, British Airways made a statement.

“Due to the knock-on effect of a technical issue that we experienced yesterday, we have cancelled some of our short-haul flights from Heathrow today, while the vast majority of our flights continue to operate,” the airline said.

Independent said that at least 150 flights were cancelled.

The BBC cited data from Cirium, a data firm. It said that 83 BA flights or about 8 per cent of its planned services on Friday were cancelled as of 8:00 BST. Cirium data said that on Thursday, BA cancelled 92 out of 860 scheduled flights.

British Airways spokesperson tried to maintain that only a few flights were affected.

Passengers frustrated “We were told to go to the flight cancellations desk to get help but there were thousands of people there and a few staff, most of the desks were empty,” Gavin Lanoe told BBC. Lanoe was stuck at Heathrow on Thursday.

Lanoe was finally told that he could not rebook and was promised £200 reimbursement in future.

He then booked ticket with another airline from Gatwick. Despite BA’s assurance that his luggage will be sent to Gatwick, it was still at Heathrow

“They’ve had enough IT failures now and they should be more skilled at dealing with them but they are not,” he told BBC.

The British airline has faced other IT problems in recent years including a major computer system failure in 2017 that left 75,000 passengers stranded over a holiday weekend, causing a public relations disaster and promises from the carrier that it would do better in future.

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